ORIGINAL ARTICLE Propaganda against the West in the Heart of … · 2019-03-19 · Th e campaign does not go against Brussels directly: the real message is hidden between the lines

CENTRAL EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION 2 (2018) ISSN 1899-5101 177

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Propaganda against the West in the Heart of Europe. A masked of� cial state campaign in Hungary

Márton Demeter

ORCID: 0000-0002-9888-9682K A R O L I G A S PA R U N I V E R S I T Y O F T H E R E F O R M E D C H U R C H , H U N G A R Y

DOI: 10.19195/1899-5101.11.2(21).5

ABSTRACT: Th ere is a twofold crisis in Europe: While mass migration is a serious challenge to the whole EU, we also have member-states striking at the EU itself. Our research shows that Hungary, with its overwhelming political communication, became the fi rst post-socialist EU member state to run offi cial anti-Western propaganda since the end of the Cold War and it seems that other CEE-countries will follow its lead. Th e campaign does not go against Brussels directly: the real message is hidden between the lines. We analyzed 644 pro-government articles on migration issues. Th e research shows that anti-Brussels narratives were strikingly frequent, and a new “war vocabulary” propaganda campaign started, stating that the EU is fi ghting against Hungary, so Hungary has to strike back. KEYWORDS: political communication, anti-Western propaganda, media bias, populism, migrant crisis.

INTRODUCTION

What is wrong with propaganda? What is the problem with the fact that sometimes the government informs the public, and of course this communication entails broadcasting the values and ideology of the ruling party? Th e problem is, as is well known, propaganda distorts reality by design, to put it clearly, it lies (Fawcett, 2007). As has been argued by many scholars, the tenor and function of public media is that it should serve adequate and important information to the audience (Durham & Kellner, 2006). Of course it is illustrative of democracies only, since “a demo-cratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some mean-ingful way in the management of their own aff airs and the means of information are open and free” (Chomsky, 1997, p. 3). Instead of helping the people to make their own opinions from the plurality of facts, propaganda tries to engineer opinions, and it tends to substitute reality with artifi cial representations. In the article by

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178 CENTRAL EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION 2 (2018)

David Welch (Cull, Culbert, & Welch, 2003, p. 317) we could read countless defi n-itions of propaganda: Some of them state that propaganda is neutral in the sense that it could be equally used with good or bad purposes (Lasswell, 1971); others say that since propaganda is biased information, it is always bad in the sense that it prevents the audience understanding reality in its genuine complexity. Since this article deals with the communication and control aspects of political propaganda, we will use the expression ‘propaganda’ in the following sense. First of all, propa-ganda always makes a tool of mass media for controlling the audience (Demeter, 2017). As opposed with pure information or reference, propaganda always has its direct intention, and most importantly, its real purpose is diff erent from its appar-ent purpose. Th e apocalypses of reality behind the propaganda, the revelation of its real political purposes (Manning, 2004, p. 13): Th at makes sense to any critical media analysis. In a basically historical article, John Corner also investigates the change of propaganda’s concept in the course of its history. He also stresses its most important properties in relation to communication: 1) Lying, 2) Th e withholding of information, 3) strategic selectivity, 4) exaggeration, 5) explicit or covert aff ective appeals to desire or to fear and 6) Use of a “rhetoric of visual display and/or linguis-tic structure which seek to manage phatic contexts (e.g., of trust, of intimacy) and to organize the fl ow of meaning and of value in ways not arising out of the ration-al content of the communication” (Corner, 2007, pp. 674–675).

POST-SOCIALIST AND HUNGARIAN PROPAGANDA

Eastern European (or post-socialist) propaganda also has a history of its own. Th e most important feature here is the strong interrelations between the state and the media, the rise of the radical right and a frequent use of nationalist and anti-immigrant rhetoric (Cull, Culbert, & Welch 2003, p. 32). According to the classical theory of Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm (1956), socialist countries followed the Russian or Soviet media model. It means that propaganda was not a defect of the media system but its inherent and important feature. Th e socialist states want-ed to control the total media and they stated that totalitarian media would serve the interests of the people. But as Bajomi-Lazar puts it (2014), there are at least two variances of Eastern European media models. According to the latest Freedom House reports (2017), in some more fortunate countries like the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, or Latvia the press is relatively free, while in Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, or Romania the press is only partially free. Th e report explicitly states that

Politicians in democracies such as Poland and Hungary shaped news coverage by undermining traditional media outlets, exerting their infl uence over public broadcasters, and raising the profi le of friendly private outlets. (Freedom House Report, 2017, p. 62)

As Oates puts it, a Neo-Soviet model of the media emerges, which includes the

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Propaganda against the West in the Heart of Europe

CENTRAL EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION 2 (2018) 179

rejection of balance or objectivity; fl aws in media law; self-censorship; government interference and harassment of media outlets; the lack of journalistic professionalism; and an atmosphere of violence against journalists. (Oates 2007, p. 1279)

It is not surprising then, that state persuasion in Eastern European countries with Neo-Soviet media models could be easily accomplished.

Western propaganda against the East, or more precisely against the ‘Orient’ (Said, 1978), is a well-known and widely discussed phenomenon since the late 1970’s. Th e “Orientalist Other”, as Eric Steuter and Deborah Wills put it, is the op-posite of the civilized European citizen, and Western propaganda is the “mechan-ism by which governments persuade the public about the evil of the enemy and the justness of its own cause.” (Steuter & Wills, 2008, p. 18). Th e so-called “War on terror” gave a new drive to the scientifi c investigation of Western propaganda against Islamic communities and culture as well; the most common method for understanding and denouncing offi cial propaganda is the content analysis of news articles (DiMaggio, 2009). But the study of propaganda against Islamic commun-ities and culture started to culminate since the beginning of 2015, when the so-called refugee-crisis began (Peters & Besley, 2015). Th e main area of research was of course the impact that mass migration caused on European societies: many studies have been written on this topic, and many of them investigate, besides other social factors, the media representation of refugees (Leander & de Haan, 2015; Hadgu et al., 2016). No government could aff ord not to inform its people on what was and is happening with refugees across Europe, because of “the high levels of public anxiety about immigration and asylum across Europe” (Berry et al., 2016, p. 4). Moreover

it is impossible to ignore the role of the mass media in infl uencing public and elite political atti-tudes towards asylum and migration. Th e mass media can set agendas and frame debates. Th ey provide the information which citizens use to make sense of the world and their place within it. (Berry et al., 2016, p. 5)

Notwithstanding that in the last few years, the issues of the migration and refu-gee crisis have been evolving into a hot topic in Europe and the world. Th e anti-migration politics of Hungary has held center stage since the second half of 2015, and it has three main causes. First, Hungary was the fi rst country — besides Spain — which started to build barbed-wire fences against so-called illegal migrants. Aswe will see later, the expression “illegal migrant” is a consciously constructed propaganda term which aims to blur the diff erences between economic migrants and refugees. Second, Hungary was the fi rst member of the European Union which spectacularly opposed the majority’s opinion as regards the management of migra-tion issues. Finally, more and more political analysts started to think that the at-titude of Hungary could serve as a role model for other CEE countries. (For a great recapitulation of this topic see the New York Times article of Niels Muiznieks (2016).

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It is not surprising then, that there are many scientifi c analyses which try to exam-ine the political communication of the Hungarian mass media, and especially of the government. Most of them could be conceived as antecedents of the current study, in spite of the fact that we have a very diff erent hypothesis than other re-searchers.

An exceedingly precise and detailed article of Kallius et al. (2016) describes the whole story of the 2015 summer crisis in Budapest through the eyes of the “partici-pator observer”, namely, or in other words, from an anthropological point of view. Th is thick description (Geertz, 1973) allows other scientists to have an insight of the real events, and then the facts could be contrasted with the pictures and texts of the mass media. It is very important to emphasize that most Hungarians never even caught sight of a refugee because refugees had been accommodated in very special and distinct areas of the country. Without having real life experience or knowing the relevant facts from the media, Hungarians never had the chance to resist the overwhelming powers of state propaganda. Of course, as Manuel Castells points out, every power provokes some counter-power (Castells, 1997): in the case of Hungary we can speak of counter-activism and of counter-media as well. Th e counter-activists organizations were NGOs, like Migration Aid and the Helsinki Committee, and the counter-media was social media, namely those Facebook groups which organized the life of the whole civil pro-refugee community. Th eir communication methods and social actions are fully analyzed in Dessewff y-Nagy (2016). Unfortunately, government’s propaganda was, and still is, overwhelming: it defi nes not just the public discourse but also media semantics, and there were no real and wide opportunities and publicity for alternative semantics.

Current research on Hungarian anti-migration propaganda (Bernáth & Mess-ing, 2015; Mong, Nagy, Polyák, & Urbán, 2016) reveals many aspects of the govern-ment’s communications. Th e frames of interpretation had been fully developed in the fi rst period of 2015. As already mentioned, the campaign of government com-munication presented a new category, namely the “economic migrant”, which made it possible both to evoke emotional associations and to juggle facts. Because of the strict regulation of immigration in Hungary, immigration is absolutely insignifi -cant compared to European Union standards. Th e empirical data also shows (Bern-áth & Messing, 2015) that (in contrast to the statements of the Hungarian govern-ment) from the viewpoint of most immigrants, Hungary is not a well-developed country and it does not attract immigration. As opposed to the number of immi-grants, the number of refugees who came from war zones increased sharply. It is very important to realize that the vast majority of refugees would like to go further to Western Europe (see also Janky, 2016, p. 3). Nonetheless, the government cam-paign talks about “economic migrants” while it discloses data and ideas about asy-lum seekers. In addition, in Hungarian the attribute “economic” is strongly sug-gestive and used exclusively in negative contexts like “economic criminal” or “economic childbearing” (the fi rst expression refers to a criminal who commits

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crimes for his livelihood, the second one refers to someone who bears children only to received family support from the state). Moreover, the use of a given category has a great expressive power. Th e word ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum seeker’ evokes compassion, solidarity, and a desire to help, while the word ‘migrant’ means simply an alien, an unknown, a foreigner.

Besides the above quoted research, which deals with the semantic aspects of the anti-migration propaganda in Hungary, there are also inquiries which investigate the bias presented in the Hungarian media. As the quantitative research of Dem-ocracy Reporting International (DRI 2016) demonstrated; Hungary’s public TV backed the government position, was one-sided 95% of the time during the EU-refugee referendum, despite a legal duty to show balanced coverage. As the report suggests,

Michael Meyer-Resende, DRI Executive Director, says: Th e biased tone and lack of balanced debate makes M1 seem like an extension of the ruling party’s ‘no’ campaign. For six years Viktor Orbán has systematically dismantled democratic checks and balances. We’re seeing the results of that now. (Hungary’s public, 2016)

As can be seen by the results of contemporary research, propaganda works well. A recently unpublished inquiry of the Institute of Minority Studies states that in recent years, surveys have shown an increase in xenophobia in Hungary. Now, most people in Hungary are afraid of migrants, refugees, strangers, and foreigners.

THE ANTI-QUOTA CAMPAIGN

Aft er the culmination of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, the European Commis-sion planned to share the settlement of asylum seekers across EU states. Hungary started to fi ght against the EU relocation scheme, which will set quotas for each EU country to host a share of the migrants over two years. Hungary started to campaign against the resettlement quota and announced an anti-quota referendum.

Th e outcome of the anti-quota referendum on the 2nd of October clearly shows that the great majority of the voters would refuse to accept refugees. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, announced on 24 February 2016 that Hungary would hold a referendum on whether to accept mandatory EU quotas for relocating migrants. As the BBC News put it, “In September, the EU agreed to relocate an additional 120,000 migrants across the continent — a move Hungary opposed. Under the plan, Hungary will now have to take in a share of migrants”. But this was already known, months before the referendum. Why should the government spend more than 20 billion HUF (65,000,000 EUR) on a campaign against the resettle-ment quota? Knowing that a former campaign about a year ago was very successful in drastically increasing xenophobia in Hungary (Feischmidt & Hervik, 2015), we had to form a hypothesis on the real point and aim of the current campaign. Since to campaign against refugees and migrants seemed to be redundant and unneces-

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sary, we had to fi nd other reasons. Th e main sloganeer of the recent propaganda was “Send a message to Brussels”, and the hypothetical scenario was that if the referendum is valid and negative, then Brussels will change its mind as regards the resettlement quota. Th at’s why our hypothesis says that

— H1: Th e main target of the anti-quota campaign and the referendum itself was not the refugees, nor the migrants, but the EU itself: the West as such, with its political philosophy, its values and its slant on life.

In this article, we will empirically test this hypothesis to show the real goal of the Hungarian government. But why do we think that the propaganda did not work against the migrants, refugees or Islamic culture? As has been mentioned earlier, surveys show that most Hungarians already reject migrants and refugees to a great extent, so it is not necessary to run an expensive campaign against them. What’s more, even if the referendum had turned out to be valid, it surely would not cause the EU to change its mind, so the referendum was also unnecessary fromthis point of view. Since the last campaign chiefl y referred to — besides migration — Brussels and the EU, we started to think that the target was, and still is, the European Union.

Propaganda against the European Union is not a new thing in the case of Hun-garian political communication. First, Hungary had 40 years of Soviet oppression where the offi cial propaganda told people that the West is dying, in decline and would fall. So the story is old, just the scenery changes (Wodak, Kroshravinik, & Mral, 2013). Second, since the beginning of 2015, more than one hundred propa-ganda websites started in Hungarian which were associated with Russian organ-izations. Many authors started to think that behind the powerful yet unoffi cial propaganda against the West, we would fi nd Russia. Th ere are more and more articles which point to the dangers of Russian disinformation, see for example the article of Anne Applebaum and Edward Lucas in Th e Washington Post (2016) or Neil McFarquhar’s article in Th e New York Times (2016). Th is problem is espe-cially serious in the case of CEE countries, which had been Soviet ‘colonies’ in the not too distant past. See for example the situation in the Czech Republic, where the interior minister claimed a propaganda-war by Russia. The Czech counter-in-telligence service said in September 2016 that Russia was conducting “an informa-tion war” in the Czech Republic, putting in place propaganda agents to destabilize the country (Th e Guardian, 21 October, 2016). But there is a capital diff erence be-tween the attitude of Hungary and other CEE countries: While the latter — at least pro forma — condemn the propaganda against Europe, the Hungarian government agrees: “in Hungary, it is the government itself that’s pushing such falsehoods” (Muiznieks, 2016). In one of his most important yearly speeches the Hungarian prime minister directly said that “Th e bureaucrats in Brussels are an obstacle for us, not Islam” and “Europe’s current political leadership has failed” (Bloomberg, 2016). In this extremely astounding speech, Orbán buried the Western world,and said that the future is Eastern European, which in contrast with the old, dying

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and falling West, is energetic and viable. “Th e Great European Dream has been broken” and “we have to fi nish the idealization of Europe”, he said.

From the above mentioned reasons, we could hypothesize that the new, over-whelming, and extremely expensive campaign of the government trends directly against the EU and the West. Note, that this is the fi rst time since the fall of the Soviet regime when a post-socialist EU-member state offi cially runs propaganda against the EU.

RESEARCH DESIGN

As an empirical test, we examined the offi cial pro-government articles of the last two weeks before the referendum by content analysis. We know well that “language does not simply name the world, but constructs a view of the world” (O’Shaughnessy, 1999, p. 34) so a language analysis of a given corpus could show the intended mean-ing-giving. In the case of political naming, it is more obvious that terms and phras-es could be used by any political power to construct its artifi cial reality for a given purpose. In most cases, as Richard Dyer puts it, we don’t even have the chance to experience reality without representations: in the 21st century we learn most infor-mation from the news media (Dyer, 1993). Texts and messages of mass media could be analyzed by both theoretical and empirical methods, but currently social scien-tists prefer a combination of the two:

Typically that means that these researchers identify questions or problems (either derived from scholarly literature or occurring in applied mass communication), identify concepts that “in the-ory” may be involved or at work, and propose possible explanations or relationships among con-cepts. Implausible explanations are discarded, and viable ones tested empirically, with theoretical concepts now measured in concrete observable terms. (Riff e, Lacy, & Fico, 2014, p. 3)

SAMPLING

To measure offi cial government communications as regards the referendum, we selected the most obviously pro-government online platforms to analyze their con-tent from 19–31 September, 2016, excluding weekends. Pro-government platforms are those which a) demonstrably established by pro-government contractors or loyal friends and b) supported and maintained by state advertisements (Bevált, 2016). Th e pro-government nature of the selected online platforms has been demonstrat-ed in many reports (Urbán, 2016). As a result of our selection process, we selected three online journals, namely, kormany.hu, magyaridok.hu, and 888.hu. We have two main reasons for not selecting too many platforms, and instead of this, we endeavored to perform an in-depth analysis and a thick description of the content of the selected media. Unfortunately, the pro-government media galaxy in Hungary seems to behave like “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all”. Th ere are not serious diff erences between the content of the unoffi cial pro-government media, and even

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the diff erent medium types relay the contents of each other. So, for example, if we have an article on kormany.hu, we will listen to the same on Radio Kossuth and watch the same on M1 News. Instead of the superfi cial and only quantitative de-scription of the whole fi eld, we decided to concentrate on a narrower, but con-sciously selected target.

Th ere was no doubt that we had to choose the only offi cial platform of the Hun-garian government, where we could daily fi nd 11 to 15 articles. Most pro-govern-ment and even opposition media receive articles from this offi cial platform, because this is the place where offi cial government news appears fi rst. Th e publisher of www.kormany.hu is the Administration Offi ce of the Hungarian Government. Our second observation target was www.magyaridok.hu, which also has a print version with almost the same content. It is a fresh, new, conservative, and admittedly pro-government journal which obviously serves for political propaganda. Th e third and last analyzed platform was www.888.hu, which is also a newly-established pro-government online journal, and the government consecrated it as the opposite of the liberal portal www.444.hu which attracts many educated younger people. It is noteworthy that both portals (888.hu and magyaridok.hu) are very successful fi -nancially, because of the extremely frequent and expensive state advertisements in

Table 1. Total frequency of the selected words

English equivalent Hungarian expressionTotal frequency in articles

n = 644

Migrant Migráns 159Migrant Bevándorló 86Migration Migráció 53Refugee Menekült 42Asylum seeker Menedékkérő 9

Referendum Népszavazás 120Quota Kvóta 78October 2 Október 2 31

Brussels Brüsszel 79EU EU 29Union Unió 37Europe Európa 162

Islam Iszlám 32Terror Terror 111Muslim Muszlim 23

Source: Author.

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them. In Hungary, because of the very narrow market opportunities, almost no professional media could survive without state advertisements, and this is what the government uses to control them. Th at is why we also note state advertising during our research. Since we examined only the front pages, we took into consideration titles, headlines, and leads which were published on the front page. During our ten-day long research, we selected content from a total of 1248 articles, and the corpus also entails 34 state advertisements. Every article was snapshot at 10 pm on the corresponding day, so the content of any given day means the totality of the titles and headlines of front page articles at 10 pm. Th en we selected all the articles for further content analysis where the connection with migration issues and/or the referendum was ascertainable. As a main rule, we selected articles which contain at least one of the following words in the appropriate context (see Table 1). For query making, frequency check, and further analysis we used the CATMA (Computer Aided Textual Markup & Analysis) 5.0 soft ware of the University of Hamburg.

Of course there were titles and headlines where more than one word was con-tained, and in very few cases (less than 1%) the nature of the content was easily deducible from the context without the tagged words. As a result of this pre-selec-tion process, we found 644 articles pertaining to migration and/or the referendum.

CODING PROTOCOL

As we compiled the observation corpus, namely the above mentioned collection of articles, we started the coding process. We had a hierarchical classifi cation (for the code system, see the fi rst two columns of Table 2) which shows the class-structure of our categories (see the last three columns of Table 2). According to our hypoth-esis, we chose categories with which the semantic structure of the government campaign could be measured in relation to its messages in line with the EU, with Brussels, with the referendum and so on.

Of course we had to be aware of the reliability of our main categories, so we calculated Krippendorff -Alpha for our main and less obvious categories, namely ‘Against Brussels’, ‘Campaign for the referendum’, and ‘Present danger’. According to the reliability protocol (Krippendorf, 2004; Neuendorf, 2002) we randomly se-lected 50 examples from the corpus of 644 articles, and, aft er 15 minutes of ex-planation concerning the categories, asked 4 independent coders to categorize the articles. Th e estimated Nominal Krippendorff Alpha (generated with SPSS) was 0.8422, with much higher observed coincidence than it was expected, which shows the high reliability of our coding process.

Th e main categories were AB (against Brussels), CG (campaign for the referen-dum), AI (against Islam), ISIS and HR (Health Risks). Th ere were many subcategor-ies: under AB we have AGS (Against George Soros), AJ (against Juncker), and AM (against Angela Merkel; under CR we have AO (against the opposition), D (defense), SO (Speech of Viktor Orbán), and PD (present danger), which also have subcategor-

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ies as A (aggression), B (blasting), OC (other crime), SR (social risk), HR (health risk), and T (terrorism). Th e third main category was AI (against Islam) with the following subcategories: T (terror), A (aggression), B (blasting), R (rape), OC (other crime), and I (integration issues), with subcategories SR (social risks) and NO-GO (NO-GO Zones). Finally, we have the ISIS category with the subcategories T (ter-ror), B (blasting), and OC (other crime). We also have HR (health risks) as an in-dependent category.

It can be seen that some categories occur more than once: for example HR could be an independent main category and also a subcategory of PD; or T could be in-cluded in PD and also in AI. It means that a given semantic unity or a theme could occur independently, and also as an embedded content in a wider context. Con-

Table 2. Research categories and ordered subcategoriesCode Meaning Category 1st subcategory 2nd subcategory

AB AGS ACLA Aggression AJAB Against Brussels AM

ACL Against civil and legal aid groups (NGO’s) CR AO

AGS Against Georg Soros DAI Against Islam

PD

AAJ Against Jean-Claude Juncker BAM Against Angela Merkel OCAO Against the opposition SRB Blasting HRCR Campaign for the referendum TD Defense

AI

SOI Integration issues TISIS ISIS AHR Health risks B

NO-GO issues about NO-GO zones in Europe R

OC Other crime OCPD Present danger

ISR

SR Rape NO-GOSO Speech of Orbán

ISIST

T Terror, terrorism BOC

HRSource: Author.

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sider terrorism: if we have news which reports an Islamic terror attack in South Africa, then we should code it as a subcategory under Against Islam. But if it sup-poses that there can be a terrorist attack in Hungary anytime, than we should code it as a present danger.

Categories start with ‘against’ are the complex of some negative predicate (NPi) and the related argument (ai). For example, the category ‘against Brussels’ could be generated from ‘fault of ’ and ‘Brussels’ or ‘hazard’ and ‘Brussels’ and so on. We will see many concrete examples later. On CR (campaign for the referendum) we mean texts which say (implicitly or explicitly) that one should 1) participate in the refer-endum 2) say NO for the mandatory resettlement quota initiated by the EU. Th e meaning of the other categories is quite obvious: they express the dangerous aspects of migration in some ways.

RESULTS

Before we start discussing the results of our analysis, we have to mention that we already have our fi rst interesting issue when we received the relevant content from the whole sample. Here we found that more than 51% of the articles of the analyzed pro-government media dealt with migration and/or referendum issues during the last two weeks before the referendum. As we can see in Figure 1, the offi cial govern-ment portal (kormany.hu) was the most biased: migration and referendum issues were sometimes overrepresented up to 82% and the ratio of propaganda issues had never been less than 55%.

Th e course of the curves show that the last weekday before the referendum was the most biased day with more than 71% average migration content. In spite of the fact that our research wasn’t a comparative investigation, we made a mini-control test with the two main opposition media, in which we asked for the ratio of migra-tion issues in Index.hu and 444.hu on 30.09.2016 at 10 pm. We found that despite migration and the referendum itself, there were also hot topics in the two leading opposition platforms, the ratio was far lower than it was in the government media: in the case of Index.hu it was 17%, and migration issues occurred only in 40% of the articles of 444.hu (see Figure 2).

Th en we checked the frequencies of our main categories (Table 1) to see wheth-er the anti-EU articles were dominant in the sample. Note that our hypothesis was that the covert intention of the analyzed content was its anti-Brussels propaganda under superfi cial migrant issues. Figure 3 shows the results.

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Figure 2. Migration issues on the last day of the quota-campaign (in percent)Source: Author.

Figure 1. Migration issues during the last two weeks before the referendum (in percent)Source: Author.

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Figure 3. Frequency of the individual categories (in numbers) (5 < n < 179)Source: Author.

We can see now that even if we consider only the individual categories, against Brussels (AB) is the most frequent among them with almost 180 occurrences. It means that the 28% of the articles which thematize migration issues also include some anti-Brussels content. It is a very high percentage: note that only the immediate aim of the campaign, namely the direct campaign for the referendum could approach it with its 27% frequency, and other, obviously very important topics like defense (6%) present danger (14%) and terror (12%) could hardly at all reach them. With sub-categories AGS, AM, AJ and ACL, the ratio of anti-Brussels articles reaches 35%.

To verify our analytical results, we also made simple frequency probes with CATMA-5 where we asked for word occurrences in the whole corpus (n = 16655). Th en we used a similarity = 80 query to obtain all the phrases which contain the most frequent words. Finally, we made a semantic grouping according to our ana-

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lytical categories. As can be seen in Figure 4, this simple quantitative computer-aided analysis produced similar results as our precious content analysis.

Figure 4. Th e frequency of the most prevalent semantic groups in the whole corpus (ana-lyzed with CATMA 5.0

Source: Author.

In most cases, the reasons for classifi cation are unambiguous, only the last grouping needs to be explained: why the words ‘mandatory’ and ‘resettlement’ have been assigned to the group ‘Brussels, European, Union, and EU’? It should be men-tioned here that the complex expression “mandatory resettlement quota” was one of the most frequent collocations during the campaign. According to the offi cial propaganda, it means that the EU or Brussels forces the Hungarian government to settle immigrants in Hungary, so these terms are always in connection with Brus-sels or the European Union. To check this, we also made a double-tree analysis onthe word ‘mandatory’ and it turned out that the most frequent collocations of ‘man-datory’ were ‘resettlement’, ‘quota’, and ‘Union’ indeed.

Since both our classifi cation-based content analysis and the CATMA-5 quanti-tative analysis clearly show the signifi cant predomination of anti-EU topics in the relevant campaign texts, we found our hypothesis corroborated, and we should state that according to this current research, the campaign against migration and mandatory resettlement quota may be in fact, propaganda against the European Union, against Brussels, and against the West. Knowing this, we should analyze the concrete content of this propaganda in more detail.

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As a result of our in-depth analysis we searched for collocations of the most frequent words, and we also made double-tree analyses with CATMA 5.0 which shows the context of a given expression. Of course this mainly quantitative data only underlies the more interesting and instructive qualitative analysis which we also did aft er the statistical research. Th e main themes and narratives with their occurrence rates can be found in Table 3.

Table 3. Main topics and narratives during the quota-campaign

Themes and main narrativesNumber of

occurrences(n = 178)

Total number (%) of occurrences

(n = 178)

Sovereignty 29 16%Stubborn 28 16%Illegality 7 4%JeopardizeEuropeHungaryMigrants

316

251

17%3%

13.5%.5%

Impotency 17 10%Unpopularity 2 1%War against Hungaryworld powerBrusselsScandinavian countriesGeorg SorosNGO’sWestern mediaoppositionHungarophobia

432

23254511

24%1%

13%1%3%2%3%

.5%

.5%Hungary’s holy war against Brussels 51 29%George Soros 12 7%Merkel 17 10%NGO’s 13 7%

Source: Author.

DISCUSSION

It is easy to see that, among the anti-EU articles, there is a well-defi ned bunch of narratives, but the most frequent use well-known war-terminology (Clark, 2015). Hungarians have to fi ght against Brussels, just as Brussels made war against Hun-gary in return. Hungarian people have to fi ght for their sovereignty, for their culture, for their values, for their future and so on. In the other direction, Brussels is up

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against Hungary. Th e “impotent Brussels bureaucrats” want to send migrants, refu-gees, and even terrorists to Hungary, they want to change their 1000-year-old cul-ture. Th eir strategic partners are the western liberal media, the Soros-aided pro-migrant organizations and other NGOs, and, of course, the world powers. It is time for Hungary to show that it can stop the EU from ruining Europe.

Th e above described narrative is not new: we all know it from conspiracy theor-ies. But it is the fi rst time since the end of the Cold War that this kind of anti-Western conspiracy became the offi cial voice in the political communication of an Eastern European EU-member state. In addition, beside the narratives according to which Brussels actively jeopardizes European countries and the impotency topic, the war-narrative is overwhelming (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Th e main narratives of anti-EU articlesSource: Author.

We could have established other terminological groups within the sub-categor-ies. We created the “war terminology” group, from “war against Hungary”, “Hun-gary’s holy war against Brussels” and from the “sovereignty” sub-categories. We could also construct the “Responsibility terminology” group from the “threats” and “Impotence” sub-groups. Similarly, Angela Merkel, George Soros, and NGOs con-stitute the “Liberalism” terminology-group, and ‘Stubborn’ is an independent cat-egory.

Th e narratives behind the above-labeled categories are very simple: war termin-ology reminds the audience that Hungary has been attacked by Brussels, so Hun-garians also have to mobilize their forces. Th e most illustrious example for war-terminology is the sword-metaphor of the Prime Minister: he said that the result of the referendum would show how strong a sword can be made by Hungarians against Brussels. On the other part, responsibility-terminology suggests that Brus-sels cannot handle the situation, and it jeopardizes the future of the whole contin-ent. Th e bet is the future of Europe, but Brussels bureaucrats and the Brussels elite,

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the leaders of the EU are impotent, weak, and cowards. Moreover, according to the liberalism category, liberals want to destroy the traditional picture of Europe. It should be mentioned, that for the Hungarian government and its devotees, liberal-ism is a swear-word: it involves everything which is against nationalism and con-servatism. According to the standard propaganda, liberals don’t respect tradition, virtues, spirituality; they — with world powers, liberal NGOs, and unpopular an-tagonists like George Soros — respect only global commercialism and money.

It is noteworthy that 53% of the articles used war terminology (29%: Hungary’s holy war against Brussels, 24% War against Hungary). Examples for “war against Hungary” are those which state that Brussels wants to threaten or even kill Hun-gary: “Global world-powers want to squeeze Central Europe”, “Hungary will be under pressure because of the referendum”. Pro-government media even coined the word hungarophobia: “Th e hungarophobia of the Commissioner of Human Rights is crushing.” In the category “Hungary’s holy war against Brussels”, we could fi nd statements like “We have to save Europe against the Brussels plans!” or “Hungary doesn’t fear! Our 1000-year history could show the EU that we are capable of de-fending the country and the whole continent!”.

Th e most common themes in the category “Jeopardize” were “RIP Europe!” or “Th e end of this process will be a Muslim Europe” or even “Brussels condemned Europe to an active euthanasia!”. Other articles in the category “Sovereignty” refer to the rights of Hungarians: “Brussels wants to decide our future without us” or “Th e EU should stay a Europe of nations” or “Only Hungary is entitled to decide whom Hungarians want to live with!” could be counted as examples. Ten percent of the articles refer to the impotency of the EU: “Th e tired Brussels bureaucrats couldn’t handle the situation”. Twenty-four percent of the articles blames George Soros (7%) Merkel (17%) or the NGO’s (7%), but in most cases NGO’s are associ-ated with Soros in government propaganda: “Migrants buy marijuana plants from the money of Soros”, “A leader of a Soros-organization would accept all the mi-grants!”, “A civil organization helped the blasting expert of ISIS to leave Europe.” Finally, the category Stubborn refers to those articles which state that the leaders of the EU are pig-headed, and they will force their will on Hungary at whatever cost: “Brussels will never cancel the quotas”.

CONCLUSION

Our hypothesis was that the main target of the anti-quota campaign and the refer-endum itself was neither refugees nor migrants, but the EU itself: the West as such, with its political philosophy, its values and its slant of life. Th e empirical research shows that our hypothesis could be corroborated by the data we collected from offi cial and unoffi cial government media: 1) the most popular topic of the campaign was the anti-Brussels agenda, 2) among anti-EU articles, most text used war-ter-minology.

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Our research also reinforced former research on the subject: 1) Bernáth-Messing (2015) states that the anti-migrant campaign is overwhelming, and we can say the same in 2016: more than 51% of the pro-government articles in our sample dealt with migration issues. It is also corroborated by the current Democracy Reporting Re-search (DRI, 2016) which states similar biases as regards Hungarian television news.

But there is a very important change in the political agenda of the Hungarian government. Former research shows that, in 2015, the main topics were a) hazard, b) infection, c) crime, d) employment issues, e) cultural diff erences, f) invasion, g) Islamization, h) huge costs (Bernáth-Messing, 2015). Some categories remained, like crime, invasion and Islamization, and they constitute the narrative of ‘Present danger’ with approximately 13% frequency. Other categories like cultural diff er-ences and huge costs also remained but they lost their importance. Th e most sig-nifi cant diff erence is the following: many new categories appeared and started to dominate the government’s propaganda: among these the most popular were the anti-Brussels narratives. Th e target of the campaign somehow turned around: from East to West, from ISIS to Brussels, from radical Islam to liberalism. But what makes the government do it?

Of course this is a question we cannot answer yet, but we could draw some conjectures for future hypotheses. We know well that, theoretically, populism in general and right-wing populism in particular has a few permanent narratives, e.g., the narrative of exclusion, the narrative of nationalism, the narrative of charisma, and the narrative of patriarchy (Wodak, 2015). Th ere are many factors which show favor right-wing populism: the migrant crisis and its putative or real consequences imbue the population with hatred and fear, and this is a very good substratum for extreme populism. As an answer to the apparent crisis, the popularity of radicalism in general and of right-wing populism in particular substantially increased all over Europe (Liang, 2016). But there are also diff erences between Western European and CEE countries: while radical right-wing populist parties are becoming increas-ingly infl uential in Western European democracies (Akkerman, de Lange, & Rood-uijn, 2016), this process has already happened in Hungary. If we want to understand contemporary right-wing populism, we should keep tabs on Hungary’s offi cialpropaganda which is nationalist, populist, and exclusivist. Not just in the sense that it excludes the “historical other”, namely Islam: it started to exclude Europe, too, and the campaign which has been analyzed in this article could be one of the fi rst steps to bring it into eff ect.

AFTERWORD

Since I fi nished this paper, the Hungarian prime minister issued two new “na-tional consultations”. Th e dramaturgy of these consultations is always the same: the government starts to advertise its ideas on a given topic, and then ask the people the same questions the government already answered in its former propaganda.

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Th e title of the fi rst (in the spring of 2017) was Stop Brussels! and we have a forth-coming consultation in 2018. For the latter, we already have the offi cial campaign with the title “National consultation on the Soros plan”. Th ese two recent campaigns in 2017 reinforce our conjecture by which the Hungarian government will not stop its offi cial propaganda against the ideas of the West, but it seems that it is becoming more and more brazen.

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE Propaganda against the West in the Heart of … · 2019-03-19 · Th e campaign does not go against Brussels directly: the real message is hidden between the lines